Qlik offers a free version of QlikView for personal use. QlikView Personal Edition is the full QlikView Desktop product and uses the same installation package. The only difference is that QlikView Personal Edition runs without a license key.
QlikView Personal Edition is limited to customers who have access to the Product Downloads site. Contact support if you do not have access. You can upgrade QlikView Personal Edition to a newer version at any time through the Product Downloads site and continue working with the documents you have created.
There are no functional limitations in QlikView Personal Edition, however there are a few aspects to observe regarding the handling of QlikView documents. In QlikView Personal Edition, every document is saved with a user key that binds that file to the computer it is created on. This implies:
- QlikView Personal Edition can only open files created using that copy of QlikView. This means, with QlikView Personal Edition you cannot use your QlikView documents on different computers, you cannot share your QlikView documents with another unregistered user or open a QlikView document from another user (exempted are documents specially prepared for personal use by Qlik). However, documents created in QlikView Personal Edition can be used with a licensed copy of QlikView Desktop and they can also be published on a QlikView Server.
- You cannot import an entire document layout (sheets/objects/security settings, etc. in XML format, without the data) into QlikView Personal Edition.
Should you change computers, you will not be able to open your previously created documents with QlikView Personal Edition. In this case, you can choose to recover your files. Recovering files means a new user key is generated, assigned to the old document and used for all subsequent files, not only for that particular file. After recovering a file, you can no longer use it on the computer that you created it in.
QlikView will accept 4 user key changes in a document. After that, you will get the error message “Key length has reached its maximum” and the document will not open any more. The only possibility is to recreate it from scratch.
Therefore, you should not recover QlikView documents that you did not create (from a forum or from a colleague, etc.). Doing so will use one of your remaining recovery attempts.
Users of QlikView Personal Edition do not qualify for telephone or e-mail support from Qlik, but they can gain excellent QlikView support through Qlik Community. All content is accessible to our members, but you must register to post questions in the forum, download files or sign up for training.
One of the best ways to learn about the capabilities of QlikView is through the QlikView Tutorial, which provides helpful hints like expression examples, code blocks and design advice. The Tutorial and the corresponding files can be downloaded from Tutorials. These documents are also adapted for QlikView Personal Edition.
If you are interested in the most powerful modern analytics solution Qlik has to offer, we highly recommend our free Qlik Sense trial, see Launch your free trial of Qlik Sense. QlikView customers can take advantage of our Analytics Modernization Program, which provides the easiest and most cost-effective way to adopt Qlik Sense. For more information, see Accelerate Your Modernization.
